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Nuclear waste dump is a duty: Ferguson

Larine Statham

Australia has an international responsibility to set up secure storage for its radioactive waste, a federal minister says.

It was revealed last week that the only nuclear waste dump site currently being considered by the federal government is at Muckaty Station, 120km north of Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory.

Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson on Wednesday said a site needed to be found for the disposal of medical isotope waste from Sydney's Lucas Heights reactor.

The storage facility needed to be established before Australian waste was brought back from Scotland and France in 2014 and 2015, he said.

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Mr Ferguson, attending the opening of the southern hemisphere's first helium plant in Darwin, said it was unacceptable that some low-level radioactive waste was being kept in random locations at hospitals and universities.

"I don't think it is appropriate at the moment that some of that waste is stored at Darwin Hospital, nor at a hundred similar hospitals and universities around Australia, often, I might say, in filing cabinets and shipping containers," he told reporters in Darwin on Wednesday.

"We have a responsibility internationally ... to actually establish a national repository to store our waste.

"If you want nuclear medicine, then you'll have to accept responsibility to store your waste."

Mr Ferguson announced last week that the Howard government's Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act would be repealed, and that a new bill, stipulating scientific and environmental processes to be carried out, would go before the Senate.

A spokesman for the Medical Association for Prevention of War (MAPW) said Mr Ferguson's claim that a new waste storage facility was needed for low-level radioactive isotopes used in medical treatments, was incorrect.

"This dump is absolutely not needed for this purpose," he said in a statement.

"The minister has not fully assessed all options available for storage of the waste, including the costs, risks and benefits of continued storage at Lucas Heights.

"Indigenous Australians have already suffered from imposition of nuclear contamination through the British nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga.

"A decision to store the waste on Aboriginal land at Muckaty station would fail to meet world standards, either for scientific appraisal, or for community consultation."

Mr Ferguson said the land at Muckaty had been volunteered by the traditional owners.

"The only site that has been nominated to me and that I have a legal obligation to consider at the moment is the site nominated by the Ngapa family."

The Australian Conservation Foundation says that several traditional owners belonging to the Ngapa clan are among many Aborigines who signed a petition opposing the dump.

However, the Northern Land Council (NLC) and a number of Ngapa people met with Mr Ferguson in Darwin on Wednesday to confirm their support for the project.

Muckaty Station Ngapa traditional owner Amy Lauder told reporters she had volunteered the land as a potential site because of the economic and educational benefits that the project would bring to her people.

"We are united in our wishes," she said.

This is the first time Ngapa clan representatives have spoken to the media about the support for the proposal.

While it is understood the federal government has agreed to pay the Ngapa clan $12 million in trust for volunteering the land, NLC chief executive officer Kim Hill said the group hoped the deal would be renegotiated once the scientific and environmental assessment processes were completed.

Five clan groups are connected to five different dreaming sites on Muckaty Station, which covers an area of about 1200 square kilometres.

The Ngapa clan have volunteered about four square kilometres of their land for the nuclear dump, which would occupy a one-square-kilometre parcel of that area.

A community meeting is expected to be held by a range of stakeholders, including members of the four other clan groups, in Tennant Creek on Wednesday night.